Children's day is celebrated once in every year on the 27th day of May. A day worth remembering in the eyes of every children in Nigeria. This year, a total of about 35.6 million children who fall within the ages of 6 to 14 will celebrate nationwide, today Sunday 27th May, 2012.
Elites in Nigeria, however regret that in her riches and wealth, the Nigerian nation has over 10 million children out of the organised basic education programmes, a situation SchoolGist could only tag as ugly!
According to a report on out-of-school-children (OOSC) jointly anchored by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United Nations academic, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), United Nations Institute of Statistics (UIS) and also the Federal Ministry of Education for the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) that was presented in 2011, there's a rise within the variety of OOSC.
While 12,531,414 boys and twelve,130,673 women aged six to eleven need to be in primary faculties, 3,366,138 (26.9 per cent) and three,932,679 (32.4 per cent) of the boys and women respectively, aren't in class. This meant that of twenty four,662,087 kids, 7,298,817 weren't receiving formal education within the country 3 years ago. Also, 200,630 and 168,795 of the overall boys and women respectively, dropped out of college.
The report noted more that as at that date, 2,834,903 out of ten,912,131 boys and women aged twelve to fourteen who need to be in junior secondary faculty (JSS), were not. a complete of 625,993 dropped out of college. A breakdown of those figures showed that five,543,223 boys were speculated to be in junior faculties however one,308,779 weren't whereas 324,576 dropped out. Of 5,368,908 girls, 1,526,124 weren't in class whereas 301,417 had dropped out.
Drop-out rate was higher in junior secondary faculty than within the primary faculty class. of these kids currently in primary faculty, but one third can attend junior secondary faculty and even fewer can proceed to senior secondary.
The report noted that the matter of OOSC in each primary and junior secondary faculties was a lot of severe in all states of the 3 geo-political zones within the north than within the south.
The factors that kept the kids out of colleges were grouped into economic, socio-cultural and provide facet barriers and bottlenecks. Government and political influence, particularly within the capability of presidency to implement education policies additionally as politicisation of basic education, equally affected the magnitude of the matter.
Proffering solutions to the scourge, government was tasked to scale up existing conditional money transfer to alleviate poverty in families linked to their enrolling kids in schools; revive the varsity feeding programme or institute commodity voucher theme for terribly poor families, enhance tax relief for low income earners, and adoption of child-friendly faculty initiatives should be undertaken.
Whatever be the case, we wish our children all the best as they celebrate this day.
Happy Children's day from The SchoolGist Team!
